If the highway-tag was the only tag on a road, I would agree with this approach, but as we are meanwhile tagging physical attributes as supplementory tags (e.g. lanes, surface, traffic-lights), as we do for administrative classification (ref), I am in favour of changing the definition for highway (no longer mainly physical but mainly according to importance / logical position in the grid). The other properties and attributes will still persist (ref, lanes, dual-carriageways, surface, tracktype, ...) and describe the situation. Also there won't be many changes / tagging-modifications necessary, because bigger roads are generally more important roads.
What do you think about this?
There are three separate concepts:
physical structure
administrative designation
importance according to actual use
In the US we are more or less following:
interstate => interstate class, so motorway
trunk is physical, but tends to match importance
among primary/secondary/tertiary, it's not really about physical any more
US highways tend to be important, and get primary without scrutiny
state highways tend to be somewhat important and get secondary by default
after that, state highways get upgraded to primary if usage
warrants, and other semi-important roads get marked tertiary
which blurs all three, but in a way that doesn't cause a lot of trouble.
I would be in favor of
trying to move slightly to importance-based tagging
using ref to mark administrative designation
using motorway and trunk as the current rules state. Here, the roads
are so big physically that the importance more or less matches, and
all such roads are important more or less by definition.
using primary, secondary, tertiary without real regard to legal status
or physical size, but according to usage:
primary is typically used for long-distance travel, 100km or more,
or for a road that until recently was still used for that and is
still culturally important
secondary is typically used for travel at least 25km (between
multiple towns)
tertiary is used to get to secondary roads (to get to the 'real
road' in the next town)
This is more or less that I do around my town, and it mostly matches the
rules.
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